Michael Ellis De Bakey

Michael Ellis DeBakey , 1908-2008, American surgeon, b. Lake Charles, La. While still at Tulane medical school (M.D., 1932), DeBakey developed the roller pump, which later became an essential component of the heart-lung machine, and he later made refinements in the technique of blood transfusions. During World War II he helped develop what became the mobile army surgical hospital (MASH), allowing treatment of war casualties near the front lines. In 1948, DeBakey became head of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and his work there made that institution an important center for medical research and education. Five years later, he made medical history by performing the first successful carotid endarterectomy. A pioneer in Dacron grafts for blood vessels, DeBakey revolutionized the surgery of aneurysms . In 1966 he successfully implanted a ventricular assist device (see heart, artificial ) in a patient; it was removed after the patient's heart strengthened. He also led (1968) the team of surgeons that performed the first multiple organ harvest and transplant, in which four patients received organs from a single donor. DeBakey, who received a Lasker Award in 1963, was president of Baylor College of Medicine from 1969 to 1979 and chancellor from 1979 to 1996; he retired as head of surgery in 1993.

DeBakey, Michael (1908–), cardiovascular surgeon.Heart surgery was not feasible when Michael DeBakey, a native of Lake Charles, Louisiana, earned his M.D. from Tulane University in 1932. After teaching surgery at Tulane (1937–1948), he became professor of surgery at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in 1948. As president of this institution (1969–1979), he led it from fiscal crisis to major stature. He became chancellor in 1979. DeBakey was concurrently senior attending surgeon at Houston's Methodist Hospital.

A pioneer in his field, DeBakey by 1996 had performed more than sixty thousand cardiovascular procedures. His innovations varied from Dacron artificial arteries (1953) to the development of a left ventricular bypass pump (1968). Other pace‐setting achievements included patch‐graft angioplasty and aorto‐coronary bypass using vein grafts from the leg. He developed more than seventy surgical instruments and other technology for cardiovascular surgery and treatment, published in excess of 1,500 professional articles, and trained more than 1,000 surgeons. A public advocate of federal support of biomedical research, education, and better health care, he chaired President Lyndon B. Johnson's Commission on Heart Diseases, Cancer, and Stroke; endorsed the federal Medicare system when practicing physicians overwhelmingly opposed it; and championed the establishment of the National Library of Medicine in 1956. To help laypersons understand the heart and heart disease, he coauthored two bestsellers, The Living Heart (1977) and The New Living Heart Diet (1984). When DeBakey in 1996 conferred in Moscow with Russian physicians who performed quintuple coronary bypass surgery on President Boris Yeltsin, media coverage portrayed him as America's most prominent cardiovascular surgeon.
See also Heart Disease; Medicare and Medicaid; Medicine: Since 1945.

Bibliography

William C. Roberts , Michael Ellis DeBakey: A Conversation with the Editor, American Journal of Cardiology 79, no. 7 (1 April 1997): 929–50.

Charles T. Morrissey